Hurling in popular culture

Hurling and Hollywood have long been linked.^[1] Several awards have resulted from the depiction of hurling in film, including the Palme d'Or and several Academy Award nominations:

• The 1930s Warner Brothers short film Sports Thrills, narrated by CBS broadcaster Ted Husing, demonstrated hurling.^[1]
• A 1936 MGM-commissioned short series, directed by David Miller, portrayed hurling as "bordering on savage" with "all the Hollywood stereo-type images of the Irish back then, short of drinking, on the field". The GAA complained and attempted to have some of the more unpleasant scenes removed.^[1]
• The 1952 film The Quiet Man features the famous line: “If you knew your country's history as well as you claim to know it, Mr Bailey, you'd know that the Mayo hurlers haven't been beaten west of the Shannon for the last twenty-two years”^[1]
• A 1955 Paramount Studios-commissioned short film, Three Kisses,^[2] directed by Justin Herman, was nominated for an Academy Award.^[1]
• The 1956 John Ford film The Rising of the Moon featured a badly bruised and bandaged but victorious local hurling team, leading to "deep concern" about Hollywood's tendency to overdo the bad side of hurling.^[1] Novelist Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman, At Swim-Two-Birds) satirized the disagreement in his newspaper column.^[1]
• During filming of the 1958 Rank Studios film Rooney titular actor John Gregson ran out onto the Croke Park turf with the teams ahead of the 1957 All-Ireland Senior Championship Final between Kilkenny and Waterford. He wore a Kilkenny jersey to film the part.^[1]
• In the Disney production Secret of Boyne Castle 1969 - episode 1, Kurt Russell was playing Hurling at the boarding school where the mini series starts.
• The 2006 Ken Loach film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, set in 1920, opens with a Sunday hurling match in County Cork.^[3] The film won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
• In the opening scenes of the 2011 film Blitz, London Metropolitan Police DS Tom Brant (Jason Statham) uses a hurley to savagely beat up three would be car thieves. Brant is heard to say, "This, lads, is a hurley, used in the Irish game of hurling; a cross between hockey and murder".
• The Have a Word Podcast featured Hurling in their February 2024 Patreon special titled "The GAA Special".^[4]
• In the 2001 buddy-comedy film "Bandits", Troy Garrity's character, stuntman/driver Harvey Pollard states "Did you know you can bet on Irish Hurling? . . . It's like football, but with sticks!" Garrity is the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.

• Cín Lae Amhlaoibh, an early 19th century diary written in Callan, County Kilkenny by local schoolmaster and merchant Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin, makes several references to local hurling matches.
• Tomás O'Crohan's memoir 'An tOileánach ("The Islandman") famously describes the extremely informal and rough nature of hurling matches before the newly founded Gaelic Athletic Association standardized the rules and assigned referees. According to O'Crohan, hurling matches were played upon the beach of Great Blasket Island every day between Christmas Day and Epiphany. The ball was often chased into the waves and the injuries to the players were so extreme that no one was able afterwards to drive their sheep or goats up the hillside.
• The Hurley Maker's Son - a memoir by Patrick Deeley, which takes an in-depth look at the craft of hurley making during the author's childhood in a small townland in Galway - was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in 2016.
• Hurling is referenced in the works of James Joyce; he mentions it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)^[5] and Ulysses (1922).^[6]
• Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy references hurling.^[7]
• In Edna O'Brien's short story "Sister Imelda", the title character's brother is killed while returning home from a hurling match.^[8][9]
• In John Banville's novella The Newton Letter (1982), the character Edward "appeared, brandishing a hurley stick", which he later "leaned on, [...] admiring his drink" before taking it up again after urinating against a chestnut tree. "Still held dangled down" by the narrator's side, Edward then proceeds to "gently bat" him with the hurley stick.^[10]
• In Anthony Cronin's major long poem The End of the Modern World (1989), a reference to at least one "Kerry hurler" appears twice in II 86 (Kerry are more renowned for their footballing prowess; they are not, and were not at the time of the poem's publication, a serious hurling team - though they had won All-Ireland Senior B Hurling Championships in 1976, 1983 and 1986):

Picabia at the wheel of a Bugatti,
The horn's bulb to his painterly right hand,
Peaked cap reversed like any Kerry hurler.
Strange opposites, but both suffering myths.
And this was nearer than the Kerry hurlers,
A strapped down bonnet and the dream of booting
Round Brooklands or along the Great North Road.^[11]

• The Colm Tóibín novel Brooklyn (2009) features an exchange between two characters involving the confusion that may occur when discussing the similarities between hurling and the American sport of baseball.^[12]
• In Glenanaar, a 1905 novel by Canon Sheehan, hurling features.^[13]
• In The Fortune of War (the sixth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels) Stephen Maturin, applies his hurling skills when called upon as batsman in a cricket match, to the astonishment and "stark, silent amazement" of all.
• In Walter Macken's novel Rain on the Wind, one of his Irish trilogy, a game of hurling takes place, and the history and background to the game is explained; however, a player gets injured in the course of the game.
• The Eoin Colfer novel Benny and Omar (1998) is about a young hurler named Benny who moves from Ireland to Tunisia.
• Hugo Hamilton's book The Speckled People (2003) contains numerous references to hurling which he uses to come to terms with Irish and German history.^[14]
• Many of Caimh McDonnell's stories feature a youth hurling team coached by the character Bunny McGarry, such as Escape From Victory (2023).^[15]